In PowerShell, you can directly access the raw licensing data like this: PS> Get-WmiObject SoftwareLicensingService You can also check the license status of your copy of Windows: PS> Get-WmiObject SoftwareLicensingProduct | Select-Object -Property Description, LicenseStatus | Out-GridView And you can find out which Windows SKU you are actually using: PS> Get-WmiObject SoftwareLicensingProduct | Where-Object { […]

If a console application or script has changed the console colors and you want to reset them to the default colors defined in your console properties, try this: PS> $host.ui.RawUI.ForegroundColor = ‘Red’ Now, the foreground color is red. Revert it back to standards: PS> [Console]::ResetColor() Note that this will work in a real console only. […]

PowerShell v3 comes with a hugely useful new cmdlet called Invoke-WebRequest. You can use it to interact with websites which also includes downloading files. This will download the SysInternals suite of tools to your computer: $Source = ‘http://download.sysinternals.com/files/SysinternalsSuite.zip’ $Destination = “$env:temp\sysinternalssuite.zip” Invoke-WebRequest -uri $Source -OutFile $Destination Unblock-File $Destination Since downloaded files are blocked by Windows, […]

Get-Process returns a lot of information about running tasks but it does not return the process owners or the session a process is logged on to. There are built-in console tools like tasklist that do provide this information. By asking these tools to output their information as comma-separated values, PowerShell can pick up the information […]

There is a not widely known COM object that you can use to list all the installed Windows Updates on a machine. Here is the code: $Session = New-Object -ComObject Microsoft.Update.Session $Searcher = $Session.CreateUpdateSearcher() $HistoryCount = $Searcher.GetTotalHistoryCount() $Searcher.QueryHistory(1,$HistoryCount) | Select-Object Date, Title, Description

Let’s assume your script wants to share status information via a balloon message in the system tray area. Here is a sample: [system.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName(‘System.Windows.Forms’) | Out-Null $balloon = New-Object System.Windows.Forms.NotifyIcon $path = Get-Process -id $pid | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Path $icon = [System.Drawing.Icon]::ExtractAssociatedIcon($path) $balloon.Icon = $icon $balloon.BalloonTipIcon = ‘Info’ $balloon.BalloonTipText = ‘Completed Operation’ $balloon.BalloonTipTitle = ‘Done’ $balloon.Visible […]

To extract an icon from a file, use .NET Framework methods. Here is a sample that extracts all icons from all exe files in your Windows folder (or one of its subfolders) and puts them into a separate folder: [System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName(‘System.Drawing’) | Out-Null $folder = “$env:temp\icons” md $folder -ea 0 | Out-Null dir $env:windir *.exe -ea […]

When disk space gets low, you may want to clean up your temporary folder. The code deletes all files that are older than 30 days to make sure you’re not dumping anything that’s still needed: $cutoff = (Get-Date) – (New-TimeSpan -Days 30) $before = (Get-ChildItem $env:temp | Measure-Object Length -Sum).Sum Get-ChildItem $env:temp | Where-Object { […]

To append a CSV file with new data, first of all make sure the type of data you append is the same type of data already in a file (or else column names will not match). This creates a list of unique running processes (so it will not list duplicate process names): $filepath = “$env:temp\processes.csv” […]

If you need to get two random numbers from a given numeric range, and you want to make sure they cannot be the same, simply tell Get-Random to pick two numbers, and assign them to two different variables at the same time: $foreground, $background = Get-Random -InputObject (0..15) -Count 2 In our example, you would […]